Bitmain will own a copy of every PoW network

Editor's note

Over the past few months, the largest ASIC manufacturer Bitmain has announced miners for several Proof-of-Work networks. The communities responded to the news differently: the Sia team took no action, but preserved the option to fork away. Monero took a stronger stance and forked off immediately from the ASICs. Ethereum, for its part, decided nothing, but engaged in a fierce debate. In the past week, Bitmain announced Z9 Mini, a miner on the Zcash network (see story below). Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash, responded negatively to the idea of forking to prevent the Z9:

I absolutely oppose any change to the schedule or the content of the Overwinter and Sapling Network Upgrades. https://t.co/qtCGAH1QaH

ASIC-resistance has been capturing much of the community's attention in the past few months, especially as Bitmain becomes better-capitalized, and as Chinese regulator's stance on cryptocurrency mining becomes more favorable. While it is easy for the community to scream for a fork, it is important to remember that in a pure PoW network, coin holders are not the real stakeholders. Losing miners reduces the security of the network, no matter who the miners are. Since its fork, Monero has experienced a few "deep mining" fork attempts:

Further readings this week

"It is clear from those words that Buffett sees crypto assets like a baseball trading card or some other form of collectible. And if that were true of Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, Zcash, or many other popular crypto assets, I would agree with him."

CT is a double edged sword which is why you have monero and bitcoin. CT improves fungibility (good for sound money) but also increases tx fees due to size. Which is why if you need privacy, use monero. If you don’t, use btc. Also, bulletproofs only hide amounts not parties.

"Designed to give participants a protected space to discuss one of the platform's hardest problems, much of the focus was around a handful of issues that have caused controversy over the past few months. Whether it was the debate over how to return frozen funds, whether to limit ether issuance or to reject mining hardware advances, developers have struggled with how best to measure and enact the will of the diverse and polarized community."

If anyone needs more examples of how @EOS_io and @bytemaster7 are not forthcoming with how they're framing their project & neglecting to mention the trade-offs involved in their design, take a look at this. https://t.co/3MWomRq9rQ

"Around the turn of the 20th century, economists began to flinch away from the baffling big picture, and instead drilled down—on the basis of postulation, not observation—into what they thought was going on at the level of the individual firm and person."

Greatest concern remains over whether next downturn can be handled. Traditionally response to recession in industrial world has been fiscal expansion & a 500 basis point cut in interest rates. But the fiscal cannon has already been fired leaving policymakers short on ammunition.